by Casey Watson
It was a joy to watch them, and even if they did look a bit like two kids playing at being mummy and daddy, that was as much about me as it was about them. Once you were my age everyone under about twenty-five looked a bit kid-like, I supposed. But whatever my thoughts about their youth, things were falling into place now; things were just so much calmer, in all respects, too – Tarim seemed to have a really positive influence on Emma’s state of mind. Roman was happy too, as kids always are when their mums are happy. Life was drama-free, and that was just the way I liked it.
But what you like isn’t always what you get. On the Friday after Tarim’s visit, just before heading off for school, Emma asked if she could meet up with him after school. ‘Only he’s been and got a cot and a mobile and everything, ready for when we’re allowed to go for a sleepover. And they’ve been decorating and everything, him and his dad … And it’ll only be for a bit – I’ll be back by five-thirty, promise.’
I had no problem with Emma and Tarim meeting by now, obviously, just as long as it suited me – I was always the babysitter, after all – and as long as she didn’t push the boundaries. So far she hadn’t, so there was no reason to object. Though what I didn’t say was that Roman would more likely need a bed than a cot by the time Emma and he were allowed to stay over at Tarim’s. And no longer be in my care, for that matter, as until she was sixteen there was no way social services would sanction it.
‘Go on, then,’ I said, pleased that he was evidently planning for their futures. ‘I’m sure you’re dying to see it, aren’t you? And you can have till six, but not a minute longer, because by then you’ll have to take over. I’ll have had Roman all day by then and will need to start preparing Mike’s tea. Okay?’
She threw her skinny arms around me, her ponytail swinging as she embraced me. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ she said, skipping off to start her day. And me mine. I pushed my sleeves up and began my daily clock watch. If I’d forgotten how much you have to plan your day when you’ve got a baby to look after, I had remembered now, all too well – lots!
I had just put Roman down for his afternoon nap when Riley walked in; come to visit for a catch-up and a coffee and a sit-down, before picking Levi and Jackson up from school. ‘Oh,’ she said, casting around and finding Roman absent from downstairs, ‘is he asleep? I should have left it till a bit later, shouldn’t I?’
‘Charming!’ I scolded her. ‘I thought it was me you’d come to visit! We’re both so flipping busy these days and when you do show up to see me I find it’s not even me you’ve come to see!’
Riley pulled me in for a hug. ‘Of course it’s you I’ve come to see,’ she reassured me. ‘I was just after a bit of baby-cuddling practice. It’s been a while now …’
‘Oh, you’ll be getting plenty of that soon enough,’ I said. ‘Though have you told the agency?’ I asked her. ‘I was thinking about that the other day. No sooner have you been passed than you can’t actually do it! And you’ve only just got under way!’
She shook her head. ‘Not yet. It’s a bit early to start doing that stuff. But we’ve talked – David and I, that is – and we’re not really bothered. With being respite carers it’s not like the pregnancy will affect too much – not till the end, at least – so we thought we’d crack on for the time being and see how it goes.’
Riley and David were now the proud veterans of their first respite foster placement, having looked after a twelve-year-old girl a few months earlier, just for the weekend, and found the whole experience nothing but positive. And there was no reason why they couldn’t continue for the time being – it would all be great experience under their belts.
Before I knew it, it was time for Roman to be brought down from his nap and, once Riley had gone – the cuddle completed – and I’d given him a snack and got him changed, there was only an hour or so before Emma was due back home. I filled it with a little more housework while Roman sat and watched me, swapping places with Mike when he came in at five-thirty.
Even though I’d said six, when it got to ten to I could feel myself counting the minutes off. Silly, given the past few weeks, but even so I couldn’t shake it – it was just too important, I supposed, for me not to. So when the door went at five to I mentally exhaled. Good girl. And good Tarim, as well. But even as I turned on a tap to rinse my hands so I could go out into the hall to greet her, I heard the door slam, followed by footsteps thundering straight up the stairs.
That felt odd; if she needed the loo, she’d use the one in the hall, surely? Mike wasn’t in there. He was on the living-room floor, playing trains with Roman – I could hear him. I came out into the hall at the same time as he did, baby in arms. ‘Was that Emma?’ he asked me.
‘I think so,’ I said, the slam of the door fresh in my ears. ‘You stay with Roman. I’ll nip up and see what’s wrong.’
When I got to the top of the stairs I could hear water running and was relieved to see the bathroom door was open. I went in to find Emma splashing water on her face, holding her hair back as she did so, head bent close to the sink.
‘Are you all right, love?’ I asked her, as she continued to cup her hand and keep refilling it. She wasn’t answering. ‘Emma?’ I said. ‘Emma, what is it, love?’
Now she did turn, and what I saw made me catch my breath. She’d obviously been crying, but that was the least of it. Her lip was bleeding and swollen and it looked like one of her eyes was swelling so rapidly it was starting to be sealed shut. It was livid, and it looked like it was grazed as well.
‘Oh my God!’ I exclaimed, covering the two strides between us. ‘What’s happened to you?’
She twisted away from me slightly as I tried to place my hands on her shoulders so I could get a better look at her face. ‘Oh, Casey, I’m fine,’ she rebuked me, as if I was a child, and she was an adult – and that I was making a big fuss over nothing. Perhaps her vision was impaired – could she see how bad she looked?
‘Fine?’ I gaped.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was just a little fight –’
‘Little fight?’ I said. ‘With who exactly?’
I spent a millisecond allowing for the hopeful possibility that this was some spat with a girl at the unit. Which would still be bad, but not half as bad as my next thought. ‘Was this Tarim?’ I asked her, horrified. ‘Did Tarim do this to you?’
‘Yes, of course it was Tarim,’ she said irritably, cutting off the hope before it even had a chance to root.
She turned back to the sink then and returned to bathing her swollen eye with water. ‘I just need to keep putting cold water on it,’ she said matter-of-factly. Then she looked at herself closely in the bathroom cabinet mirror. ‘Fucking men,’ she said quietly, more in sorrow than in anger as she gingerly prodded at it. ‘They’re all the fucking same, Casey, aren’t they?’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – definitely couldn’t believe the tone in which I was hearing it. Couldn’t believe that that innocent-looking, charming-looking, lovely-looking boy – that boy who I’d completely changed my mind about, damn him – had just done the ugliest thing imaginable to this girl.
‘Tarim did this to you?’ I said again. ‘Punched you? Tarim hit you?’
‘I told you,’ she said, lowering her head and returning to the splashing. ‘We had a fight –’
‘Oh, so he has an eye that looks like that too, does he?’
‘I wish,’ she said, with a degree of vehemence from behind her curtain of hair. Then she lifted her head again and sighed. ‘What?’ she said, meeting my eye and presumably shocked by my horrified expression. ‘You’re not telling me you’ve never come across a bit of domestic violence, are you? Christ, it’s not like he’s the only bloke to have ever given his bird a smack, is it? Just leave it, Casey, okay. I’ll be fine.’
I was stunned. She was fourteen and she was talking like she was forty. The sort of forty-year-old often attached to a big glass of mother’s ruin down the pub, having spent the best years of her life b
eing smacked around by men. A prostitute, a drug user – more often than not, both. So while I was set on finding out all the whats and whys and wherefores, I was more concerned, in the short term, about Emma’s attitude towards it – that this sort of thing was perfectly normal. It took my breath away.
‘I’m sorry, Emma,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level, ‘I won’t be leaving it.’ The last thing I wanted was to have the volume ballooning the way the skin around her eye seemed to be doing.
‘Please?’ she said wearily. ‘Please? It will all be okay if you just leave it.’
‘No it won’t. How do you work that out? In what sense well it “be okay” exactly? Okay for who? You? I’m afraid I don’t get that. Who the hell does he think he is, anyway? Is he mad? You realise he could go straight back to prison if you report what he’s done to you? Do you?’
She stopped filling her hand again and shook the drips from it angrily. ‘Grass him up?’ she spluttered. ‘Grass on my own boyfriend? Are you for real? It was just a little argument that got a bit heated. That was all. I’ve told you, I’ll be fine. Christ, it’s like, nothing! Are you for real?’ she said again. ‘Look,’ she added, ‘I really need to pee, okay. Can I, like, do that at least? Please?’
‘Should we call someone?’ Mike asked once I trooped back downstairs. He was in the hallway, presumably having heard much of our exchange, Roman grizzling and fretful in his arms now. ‘John?’ he went on. ‘Maggie? The police? We can’t just leave this.’
I shook my head. ‘Not just yet,’ I said. ‘Not till we get a few answers. Once anyone else is involved she’ll just clam right up, I know it. Let’s just see what we can get out of her first.’
Emma came down, moments later, looking guarded and slightly sullen, as if it were I who’d offended her most in this equation by having the temerity to speak ill of Tarim. She immediately set about sorting Roman’s tea out, pulling a jar of baby food from the cupboard and opening the microwave, then pulling his high chair close to the kitchen table, ready.
That done, she took Roman from Mike without a word or gesture, sat him in the chair and, while he began wellying in to his jar of chicken dinner, started chopping bits of banana for his pudding.
‘Look,’ she said to both of us, in the same world-weary air, ‘it’s not what you think, okay? It’s not.’
Since neither of us answered – we were too gobsmacked – she sighed and tried again. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know it seems weird if you’ve never seen it before, but Tarim loves me, okay. He really didn’t mean to do this. Look, he’s sorry, okay? And if it’s any consolation, he feels terrible. Look, I can handle it –’ she looked at me. ‘Honestly. I can handle it, and I can handle him. God, this is nothing –’
Mike rolled his eyes. I could see he knew exactly how he’d handle Tarim, given half a chance. ‘Nothing compared to what?’ he asked her pointedly.
‘Nothing compared to the sort of shit my mother had to put up with. Take anything from anyone, she would. That’s not me! This is just relationship stuff, okay. It happens. Look,’ Emma said again, while I tried to stop my eyes bulging out of their sockets, ‘I’m not trying to defend him, okay? I wouldn’t do that. But sometimes these things, well – they just happen. You can’t go off on one just because of one fight –’
‘It wasn’t a fight,’ I said. ‘He hit you.’
‘Yeah, but I started it.’
‘Emma, love,’ Mike started, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s a load of crap. Like Casey says, it wasn’t a fight – not a fair fight. He’s a fully grown man, Emma, and he hit you. He’s bigger than you and stronger than you and any way you choose to describe it, it’s abuse, plain and simple. Like I heard you say, it’s domestic violence, but the emphasis is very much on the “violence” bit, and no matter how you dress it up, or try to tone it down, he deserves to be punished.’
I could see the tears welling in Emma’s eyes – well, the one eye that wasn’t swollen anyway. ‘Don’t you think he knows that?’ she railed at Mike, as if she was the counsel for the defence in court. ‘Don’t you think he’s suffering now, cos of this? He’s devastated, he is, devastated. And it’s not even his fault!’
I could tell from the way Mike was clenching and unclenching his fingers that he was getting angry, and I didn’t want him to lose his cool. I needed to intervene. ‘Okay, love,’ I said gently, ‘if that’s how you feel then you must explain why you say that. Make us understand. Why was this not really Tarim’s fault?’
But Emma shook her head. ‘What’s the point?’ she said, obviously seeing Mike’s set expression. She wasn’t stupid. ‘You want to blame him. How can you understand, living the sort of lives you live? Your perfect lives, your perfect kids, your perfect everything. You have no idea about real life at all!’
‘This is real life,’ I corrected her. ‘And trust me, we have seen some. And we’re not perfect – never were – and neither are our kids. So I don’t know where you get the idea that we can’t understand this. I know all about violence and “domestic violence”, as you call it – and it’s still violence. What I can’t understand is how you can sit there and be so loyal to someone who has punched you in the face. That’s what I don’t get.’ I waited just a heartbeat.
‘Because I love him! And he loves me, and he never meant to hurt me. Can’t you get that? It was his mate!’
Mike scoffed. ‘His mate that hit you? Come on, Emma, don’t pull –’
‘No, not hit me!’ she barked back at him. ‘He told him shit about me! He told him I slept with his other mate while he was inside! I don’t know why. Don’t have a clue what the fuck he has against me. Probably jealous that Tarim’s got a decent life in front of him. Probably jealous of me cos Tarim doesn’t wanna get stoned with him all the time now – I don’t know! But it was him. Now d’you see?’
‘And did you?’ I asked her.
‘Did I what?’
‘Did you sleep with this boy?’
She looked dumbfounded. ‘Of course I didn’t! Why the hell would I ever do that?’ She exhaled heavily. ‘But how could Tarim know that? He wasn’t there, was he? And he trusts Kel – he’s, like, his best mate – so he’s bound to believe him, isn’t he?’
‘Over you?’ asked Mike.
‘No!’ she said. Then seemed to think. ‘But, yeah. Yeah, a bit. Of course he doubted me. He was bound to. Stuck inside. Me on the outside. Us not seeing each other. I totally get that! Why can’t you?’
By now Roman was grizzling quietly, clearly as sick of the situation as we were. Emma snatched him up from his high chair, knocking the spoon onto the carpet, where it spread a small slick of curry-coloured puree.
‘Look, you have no idea, okay?’ she said, bending automatically to retrieve it. She seemed so small and frail, so innocent, so fragile – especially with the now hefty Roman parked on her hip. How dare he. How bloody dare he. I was quietly seething.
‘Go upstairs,’ Mike said, his voice thankfully controlled and measured now. ‘Sort out Roman, get him ready for bed. We can talk about this later on.’
I reached an arm out and squeezed Emma’s. This time she didn’t pull away from me. ‘Go on, love,’ I said. ‘Like Mike said, we’ll talk later.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ she insisted, loyal to the very last, as she left the room.
I shook my head sadly. She was so wrong. There was.
Chapter 15
I woke the next morning with a splitting headache. I hadn’t had one in a long while and I didn’t doubt this one was due mostly to tension. The memories of the previous evening came rushing in to join it. We’d got no further with Emma even though we’d tried the softly-softly tactic. She was adamant; it was completely understandable that Tarim had lost it, and even if she was cross with him – which she did concede she still was – she was resolutely forgiving and loyal.
I got up, feeling sluggish as I turned on the shower, weighed down by the prospect of a difficult day. As well as the couple of painkiller
s I threw down, I knew I would need plenty of caffeine to get through the morning.
‘So,’ said Mike, once I was downstairs and dressed, ‘you’re going to make some calls this morning, are you? Report this?’ He was heading off to work for the morning before returning at lunchtime, ready for his Saturday afternoon football with Kieron. I wished I could go with him. Just throw a coat on and go. And I never felt like that about my work.
He passed me coffee. ‘Give me a moment, love,’ I chided as I took it from him. ‘Of course I am. I must. But I’m not going to do it just yet. I really don’t want to till I’m sure Emma understands why we have to.’
‘Good luck with that,’ he observed, managing a smile to go with it. Albeit a grim one. We both knew the potential implications of reporting Tarim’s violence. And neither of us felt up to facing them.
‘I know,’ I said, sighing. ‘But I at least want to try first. If I can just get her to see that he needs to address this sort of behaviour – God, even if just because she needs to think about protecting Roman – then I’ll feel much happier about doing it, that’s all.’
I sat down at the kitchen table and Mike sat down with me. ‘Casey, love,’ he said gently, ‘look, I know it’s going to be hard, but truth be told, it really shouldn’t be. We should be clear what our roles are. If we let it go this time –’ he raised a hand. ‘No, I know you’re not saying that, but part of you is thinking that, I know it is – then it’s absolutely as if we’re condoning this. It would send exactly the wrong message to Emma, you know that. Thanks to that mother of hers, she already thinks it’s okay to get the odd slap off a man, God help that woman. She clearly never fought back, never told her daughter it was unacceptable – just sucked it up, took it on the chin, literally. And it’s a cycle that will just keep repeating in perpetuity if we – you and me – don’t nip it straight in the bud.’
